Death on the Patagonian Express

by Hy Conrad

“Are you inviting me?”

  “I am, if you would be so kind. We are starting with a small group—travel writers, big tour operators. All we ask is your honest opinion in your blog. Make your trip part of an adventure, if you like. Eight days of wonder in the Eighth Wonder of the World. Do you like the phrase? I made it up myself.”

  The man had the charm thing down. And she sympathized with his story. More than sympathized. Her own travel business was a tribute to Eddie’s dream, just as Jorge’s business was a tribute to his father’s. “I’m very tempted,” Amy said haltingly. She hated disappointing people. “But I’m not TrippyGirl. I know photos of me show up on the site, but . . .”

  “It’s you and your mother combined,” said Jorge with a wink. “Mrs. Abel told me.”

  “Jorge took me to dinner last night—at the Gastropub. Their evening menu is much more extensive. Good martinis. You should give it another shot.”

  “Mrs. Abel came up with our solution.” Jorge beamed. “Both of you will be my guests. TrippyGirl and her mother. No one need know your secret.”

  Amy turned to Fanny. “You already said yes? You and me? No, no. We are not traveling together.”

  “Why not? We’re both TrippyGirl. This is the perfect opportunity.”

  “To do what? Get killed together?”

  “Killed? No, Patagonia is perfectly safe,” Jorge said, palms raised in assurance. “Why do you say killed?”

  Have you actually read the blog? Amy wanted to ask him. Taking a Siberian train isn’t the hallmark of TrippyGirl. It’s murders happening all around. It’s almost getting killed. She didn’t know why, but it was undeniably true. The only reason she’d survived the previous two trips, in her mind, was that Fanny had not been there, egging her on to even more reckless behavior.

  “Amy, dear, this is our opportunity to quash those nasty rumors,” Fanny said.

  “What rumors?” asked Amy.

  “That Trippy is a fake and I’m a troll under a bridge.”

  Jorge O’Bannion had probably expected a different reaction. After all, here was a young traveler, a travel agent. He was offering her a free, unique tour, two of them, in return for what she would be doing, anyway, writing about her exploits. “I thought you might enjoy a vacation.”

  “So did I,” said Fanny. “Apparently, old Mrs. Troll was wrong.”

  Jorge O’Bannion had brought along a binder of promotional material, complete with glossy photos and maps and flashy hyperbole. It looked extraordinary, Amy admitted as he handed it over and she leafed through the pages. She and Fanny would certainly consider his generous offer and get back to him. Later today. Tomorrow, at the latest. It was her way of getting rid of him, and they all knew it.

  “It would be such an honor to show you my corner of the world,” said the courtly gentleman. “Please.”

  Amy stood up, checked the clock on the wall, and made some noises about having an early appointment at the store. Jorge, looking embarrassed, his charm no longer oozing, thanked them for their time.

  Fanny walked him out the door and returned to the kitchen a minute later. “That was rude,” she said and started busying herself at the sink. Dishes clanged against the porcelain bowl. “I can’t believe you said no.”

  “It took me by surprise. I didn’t mean to be rude to him.”

  “Rude to me. Implying I would get you killed! Have I ever gotten you killed, young lady? You used to love traveling with me. Our summers at the Jersey Shore? I wouldn’t let you go into the ocean for a full hour after lunch. Plus, the water wings . . . That’s how careful I was. But I understand if you’re afraid of life. That’s just who you are.”

  “I know. I know it’s irrational,” Amy muttered into her empty cup of coffee. “It would probably be an extraordinary trip, with no one getting killed for miles. And I’ve always wanted to see Patagonia. Unfortunately . . .”

  “Don’t say ‘unfortunately’ and whatever comes after that word. If you’re not going, fine. I’ll go without you. I’ll buy one of those little head cameras and show you who the real TrippyGirl is.”

  “You are not going without me. Talk about a death wish!”

  “Good. Then you’re coming. I made the plane reservations last night—after the martinis. Now call Mr. O’Bannion, right now, before the man can catch a cab. Here’s his number.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Seen from a distance, perhaps from a rooftop half a mile away, the barrio most resembled a collection of paint chips—paint chips remembered from a fever dream of bad decorating. A balcony of bright orange stood next to a wall of aquamarine, with its windows etched in canary yellow, next to another balcony of bright red with flamingo-pink railings. This visual chaos went on and on, around every corner of every block of the two- and three-story buildings. It was surprising what fun a little disorganized color could add to what was essentially a working-class neighborhood.

  The Buenos Aires barrio of La Boca had begun as a dockworkers’ town by the river’s mouth—boca in Spanish. Interspersed among the dry docks and warehouses were modest homes built from ship wood and corrugated iron and sheet metal and whatever else had been lying around a hundred-plus years ago. To some extent, it was still a lower-class district. But during the past few decades, the most colorful few blocks have been transformed into a place everyone had to see. Tapas restaurants and curio shops poured out onto the sidewalks. Tango dancers in full romantic regalia performed on the corners in front of the cafés, sweating in the February heat, hoping to lure customers inside. In short, La Boca was a tourist trap.

  “It was almost abandoned,” said Pablo as he ushered them across a cobblestone street. “Then, in nineteen-sixty, an artist, Benito Quinquela Martín, painted the walls of a few houses and built a stage for outdoor performances. More and more artists began coming to the neighborhood. . . .”

  Amy didn’t enjoy tours. Her feeling was that travel involved discovering a new world on your own. Sure, time would be wasted and there would always be part of a city that you didn’t get to experience. You wouldn’t get to hear all the facts, either, not unless you walked around with your nose in a book. But if you were lucky, you’d get lost and end up with a one-of-a-kind experience, good or bad, instead of a preprogrammed spiel from a guide just trying to make a living. Pablo, she thought, was better than most. He was young and thin, slight and energetic, with the stubble of a goat patch that either couldn’t or wouldn’t develop beyond a thick shadow in the middle of his chin.

  They had arrived on an overnight flight, nonstop from JFK—eleven hours in business class, where the seats did lie flat but, in order to accomplish this, mechanically sank you into a narrow coffin-like bed. Fanny, who was both shorter and broader than her daughter, had wound up flat on her back, unable to turn, hands folded across her chest, looking like a body at a viewing. Although she protested that she’d barely got a wink of sleep, Amy knew better, since her mother had a habit of snoring loudly when lying on her back. It was the rest of business class who barely got a wink.

  The time difference was a mere two hours, ahead, not behind, since the South American continent jutted a good deal farther out into the Atlantic Ocean. By the time they had got settled into their five-star hotel, a converted mansion more European than anything in Europe, it was time for lunch by the pool, then this half-day tour of Buenos Aires.

  Pablo was to be their guide throughout the eight days. Only two of Jorge O’Bannion’s guests had expressed interest in the city tour—Fanny and Alicia Lindborn, the stylish silver-blond matriarch of Lindborn Travel. Amy had been dragged along once it became clear to her that (a) Fanny was going with or without her and (b) despite her professed lack of sleep, Fanny was determined to hit the ground running. That included the use of a small sports camera, high tech and sturdy looking, mounted to the front band of her straw sun hat on a glittery red strap, ready to record whatever adventure might come along.

  “Follow me,” said Pablo, escorting his three charges around another multicolored corner
. “This is my favorite. Not many tourists see this.” He picked up speed as he walked, then led them around another corner to a short alley and around another corner to a one-story warehouse that ran the entire length of the block. The street was nearly deserted. “Here. Not pretty in the normal way. But my favorite.”

  The women stopped to take it in. Fanny had been toying with the buttons on her hat-mounted camera. She adjusted the hat and camera squarely back on her head, then turned slowly to record the entirety of the sight before them.

  Amy had seen dozens of murals during her few hours here. They were unavoidable. More than any other city, Buenos Aires seemed to treasure its inventive, whimsical, sometimes ugly public art. They were on the sides of factories and garden walls, on office towers and government buildings, even on the blank walls of private homes. Some were true works of art, surrealist and masterful, like Salvador Dali paintings of imaginary landscapes and mythical beasts. Others depicted soccer stars, singing stars, tango couples, Eva Perón, Daffy Duck, cute kids and puppies. Even the lowliest graffiti tags seemed elevated by the city’s inspiration.

  This one, taking up the one long wall of stucco, was nothing more or less than angry. Angry and chaotic. The colors were bright, almost cartoonish, with bold outlines and hard angles, reminiscent of one of the paint-by-numbers projects Amy had worked on as a kid. “What is it about?” she asked. It had to be about something.

  Dozens of characters stared out from the wall, peasants and laborers, some of them struggling with hard, blue-faced, rifle-toting soldiers, others seeming to struggle with the wall itself, as if trying to emerge from a dungeon. All arms and legs and desperate faces. To the far left was the oversize orange visage of an army general in his uniform. It was a nightmarish face. He was shouting orders or deadly threats, his mouth turned down at the edges, his tongue a wet blob in the back of his throat. A fat red fist held a gun, and one of the fingers of the fist was adorned with a ring, gold with red eyes—the roaring head of a lion.

  “Have you heard of the desaparecidos?” Pablo asked, lowering his voice to a hush.

  All three women nodded, including Fanny and her bobbing camera. “The disappeared ones,” she said. ”Did that happen here?”

  Amy would have to look up the details. But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she recalled, tens of thousands of Argentineans simply disappeared. They would be living their normal lives one moment, on the street, in cafés, answering an unexpected knock at the front door. The next moment they would be pulled in for questioning by the army, never to be seen again.

  “The military dictatorship,” Amy said.

  She could see it now in the painting—ordinary citizens dragged from their routines, mouths gaping with fear. The soldiers, a monolithic blue wall of force, ripped at them with clawlike hands. At the edges of the mural, top and bottom, shadows of human body parts melted into a fiery background. And dominating the horror show was the orange, diseased face of the man giving the orders.

  “Who is that?” Alicia Lindborn asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Pablo. “There were many generals. Maybe this one was worse. Or maybe he’s a symbol. The government said it was fighting the communists. But all kinds of people got disappeared. Artists, doctors, professors, even people who never spoke out about the dictatorship but who might have some influence if they did. Many bodies—most of them, I think—were never found. Babies were taken away with their mothers. When the mothers died, the babies were adopted by strangers and given new names. Our country is still trying to make peace with this.”

  “Babies?” Alicia splayed one hand of her perfect manicure over her heart. “They’d be grown-ups now. Do they even know who their real parents were? Or that they’d been killed?”

  “Some do. Some don’t. If you were five years old, of course you’d remember your parents.”

  Fanny shuddered, then gave their tour guide the eye. “And this is your favorite?”

  Pablo shrugged. “We porteños, the people from Buenos Aires, we love dramatizing the past and mulling over it.”

  “In this case, I can’t blame you,” said Amy. “How do you get over something like that?”

  “Lucky for us, we love to get mentally analyzed.” The guide chuckled at his own mistake. “I mean psychoanalyzed. There are more psychoanalysts in Buenos Aires than taxi drivers. Honestly. It’s become a big part of our culture.”

  “Do you use a psychoanalyst?” Fanny asked.

  “I use two,” Pablo said, seemingly proud of his sanity.

  Meanwhile, Alicia kept focused on the mural. “It’s got such power,” she said in a quiet voice. “More than any realistic depiction. Thank you for showing it to us.” Alicia Lindborn behaved like a perfect guest, curious and considerate and open-minded, befitting her rank as a travel business legend. “Who is the artist?”

  “No one knows,” said Pablo. “It was painted over a period of a month, always in the dead of night. If anyone saw the painter or helped him, they never said. And no one would ever paint over this. They wouldn’t dare.”

  For Amy, the mural would become the highlight of their afternoon. Sure, they’d been to the Eva Perón balcony and the ornate opera house and the widest avenue in the world, with sixteen lanes of traffic and a much-needed median strip in the middle to avoid getting run over. But the angry mural was what Amy would remember best.

  Pablo and the driver dropped them off in front of the ex-mansion in the Recoleta district. The hotel had probably once been the city house for a family not unlike Jorge O’Bannion’s, barons of the pampas, making their fortunes from sheep and cattle and wheat and cheap labor.

  Amy was halfway to the doorman, envisioning a nice dinner of Argentine beef and an early bedtime, when she looked back to see Fanny, the camera still in place on her straw hat, talking to Pablo. He wrote down something on a notepad and tore off the page. Fanny was all giddy smiles as she walked up the stone path, waving the page.

  “No,” Amy said, guessing pretty much where their conversation was going to go. “I’m tired.”

  “It’s two hours earlier in New York,” Fanny countered. “And after all the sleep you got on the plane . . .”

  “You’re the one who slept.”

  “Really? You’re quibbling about sleep on our one night in Buenos Aires? Pablo told me about this tango joint where just the locals go.” She checked the slip of paper. “A milonga, whatever that is. And don’t worry about your dinner. He says the place doesn’t even open until eleven.” Fanny raised the other hand to swat away her daughter’s next concern. “That’s nine p.m. You can’t possibly want to go to bed at nine. Not in the city that invented tango.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “No, dear, you don’t.”

  CHAPTER 5

  La Iglesia del Tango, the Church of the Tango, occupied a small, deconsecrated chapel on the edge of the city’s business district. It seemed like an unusual concept for a “locals only” club, but it had been in this venue since the 1940s, and the inescapable parallel between dance and religion had proved to be no deterrent to its popularity. The fact that it had an old wooden dance floor with a lot of spring didn’t hurt, either. When Amy and Fanny arrived, after their steak dinner and after eleven thirty, the milonga was already half full. A four-piece band was tuning up on the stage, where the altar had once stood: accordion, violin, guitar, and standing bass.

  Amy always traveled prepared for an elegant evening, one elegant evening, with a slim, black, sleeveless Liz Claiborne and a pair of low black heels. Fanny’s preparation for the evening had been more time consuming, since it had involved hiding her TrippyGirl sports camera in a huge artificial rose and then figuring out how to hold the rose in place in the folds of her henna-dyed pageboy. They had settled on using the band from her straw hat. The resulting look was eccentric but passable, and Amy was glad to find the club mercifully dim.

  There was a free table for two, one row back from the action, and they settled in. The accordion player,
a man in his eighties, struck the first chord of the evening, a breathy, elaborate glissando. A handful of couples headed for the floor almost immediately, and Fanny pointed her rose in the direction of the crowd. Meanwhile, Amy went to get them drinks, something seriously alcoholic, at a bar that might have once been part of a confessional.

  Amy was good at languages. She was nearly fluent in French, thanks to high school and a cute foreign exchange student named Jules. Her Italian was also decent, thanks to her college minor in Renaissance art and a semester in Sicily. But she’d always had a deaf ear for Spanish. Despite its similarity to Italian, or perhaps because of it, Amy found herself incapable of understanding more than a few sentences in a row and unable to utter more than a few words. When she found that the busy, disinterested bartender didn’t speak English, she pointed to what someone else was ordering and managed to say, “Dos, por favor.” What he started making for her was a combination of rum and Fernet-Branca, which, she seemed to recall, was some sort of aromatic bitters.

  The dance hall was a dusty, charming combination of the sacred and the profane, of the homey (bad paintings by local artists hanging crooked on the walls), the old-fashioned (a dangling mirror ball where a religious chandelier must have once hung), and the extremely old-fashioned (tattered red velvet banquettes inhabited by dancers whose grandparents might have sat on them in days gone by).

  Amy paid for her drinks in U.S. dollars, the preferred currency in Argentina these days, and weaved through the tightly knit dancers back to their table for two, only to find that her chair had been taken. A silver-haired gentleman had scooted it around to Fanny’s side of the little round table, had sat down, and was holding out his hand in invitation. They moved fast, these old porteños.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” said Fanny in a tone that needed no translation, especially when combined with a girlish giggle. When she took his hand and they both stood, it became apparent that the gentleman was nearly a foot taller. Many men were, including Fanny’s late husband. Fanny reacted by reaching up to adjust the artificial rose strapped to her head. “Help me,” she ordered Amy. If the gentleman found anything unusual in seeing a woman and her daughter rearrange the lens of an artificial rose, he didn’t let on.